As Palmer Report has already laid out in detail, Hope Hicks’ refusal to cooperate with the Trump-controlled House Intel Committee on key questions today is actually a sign that she’s now playing for Team Mueller. But even though her testimony today was a strategic farce overall, it turns out she did make one crucial, if not surprising, admission: she’s been lying to cover for Donald Trump.

There is no exact quote from Hicks yet, but the New York Times is reporting tonight that she admitted to having told what it characterizes as “white lies” in order to cover for Trump’s own “exaggerations and outright falsehoods.” (link). Wait, so where does this get us? The short answer is that it feels a lot like the preamble to her upcoming confession to Robert Mueller about the lies she’s told that have obstructed justice in the Trump-Russia scandal.

The key (and vastly underreported) point in the current Hope Hicks saga is that Trump’s former legal spokesman Mark Corallo recently testified to Mueller that he heard Hicks promising to Trump that she would suppress evidence of Donald Trump Jr’s guilt in the Trump-Russia scandal (link). If Mueller has been able to substantiate this claim, then Hicks is going to prison for obstruction of justice unless she cuts a plea deal against Trump. It’s why Trump had his pet committee haul her in today, to try to figure out what she’s planning to give about him to Mueller.

Hope Hicks dodged the most important questions today from Trump’s puppets on the committee, for the rather obvious reason she doesn’t want to tip them off to what she’s planning to give to Mueller. But even as she refused to answer the important questions, she used one of the lesser questions as an excuse to officially establish that she’s been lying on Trump’s behalf all along. Stay tuned.

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